


Phoenix

by DreamsOfSleep



Series: Nick & Cece – The Best Friends Remix [2]
Category: New Girl
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Arranged Marriage, Backstory, Best Friends, Depression, F/M, Fix-It, Friendship, Gen, Growing Up, Infertility, Parent-Child Relationship, Platonic Female/Male Relationships, Road Trip
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-05-23
Updated: 2017-01-24
Packaged: 2018-06-07 08:54:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,002
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6797446
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DreamsOfSleep/pseuds/DreamsOfSleep
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>AU where Nick and Cece become best friends first before Nick meets Jess.</p>
<p>Part 2 of 3: How Cece lost herself and then found herself again.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. No Strings Attached

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [We Could Both Be Stars](https://archiveofourown.org/works/6164428) by [cecilia095](https://archiveofourown.org/users/cecilia095/pseuds/cecilia095). 



> I loved the detail in cecelia095's fic where Nick sees Cece as smart and beautiful. 
> 
> Part 2 of this series is a fix-it fic exploring Cece's headspace as she deals with infertility issues, her strained relationship with her mom, and her career/life aspirations. This fic also builds upon the strong friendship Cece has with Nick in [Part 1 - New Girl: Cece Edition](http://archiveofourown.org/works/6782893). (I wrote the two parts as standalone pieces, but I think reading the parts in order enhances the emotional impact of the story so I strongly recommend you read Part 1 first before reading this one.)

Cece would always tell people, "I don't do relationships." That had been a fact of Cece’s life since she had gotten her heart broken for the last time when she was 20. She had been a social outcast with her best friend Jess growing up. During those awkward preteen and teenage years, they used to stay up late into the early morning hours at sleepovers furtively whispering about who their "perfect guy" would be. For Jess: someone bookish with a nice smile and dark eyes, kind to animals, likes slow food and fast bicycles. For Cece: tall, dark, and handsome, someone with an edge who would take her speeding down the interstate on his motorcycle as the wind blew through her hair, a lit cigarette tucked in the corner of his mouth, someone her mother would never approve of. 

Once she got ‘discovered’ and learned how to dress and do her hair and makeup, male attention had come easily. She thought she wanted the "bad boy," but of course, the reality never lived up to her expectations. They were all jerks, subtly putting her down around their friends, lying to her, cheating on her, or living rent-free on her couch as she killed herself trying to book jobs in her early modeling career. As a teenager she had wanted so _badly_ for boys to notice her so when she became a model she fell into the trap of putting up with a lot of abuse to keep her boyfriends around. The final straw was when Kyle, a male model she had been dating for a year, broke her heart by cheating on her on her 20th birthday. He had lied to her and said he was “sick” so he couldn’t attend her birthday party. She found out the next day from other models at her agency that he had lied to her and went to a strip club that night and ended up sleeping with one of the exotic dancers. As she screamed obscenities at him while throwing his stuff out of her apartment window and tears streamed down her face, she swore that she would never waste her tears crying her eyes out over another man. She would never end up being one of those women desperately waiting around for a man to love her. 

She had been mistrustful of men ever since. They wanted her of course, wanted her for her body, but no one had ever really wanted _her_. That is until one Nick Miller. From the moment they had met, he had looked at her and seen exactly who she was. He had treated her like a person instead of an object, something to be used, abused, and then thrown away. Disposable. He had quickly become her best friend, a stable presence in her life that she could count on no matter what. He was just such an inherently _good_ person, honest and fiercely loyal, that it hurt her heart to think about sometimes. She didn’t know what she would do now without him in her life; she couldn’t imagine her life without him. 

She still had needs of course, but she preferred to keep them separate from the rest of her life. She loved living in the loft with Nick, Schmidt, and Winston who she affectionately referred to as "her boys." They had one-night stands too, of course, who they brought back to the loft, and they wouldn’t judge her if she did the same, but she never liked bringing the guys she slept with home with her. She had spent her teenage modeling years hooking up with men trying to find love and she knew them all. She no longer wanted to hear them lie to her and tell her they loved her because they wanted her body. One night stands were always more honest. She would always go back to their place to hook up after meeting them at a bar or club and leave abruptly afterwards. That way she wouldn't have to endure the Walk of Shame, she could go home and put on her comfy pajamas, she could wake up in her own bed and not in some douche’s bachelor pad, and one of her boys would always make her breakfast in the morning.

She knew that at her age she _should_ be concerned with finding “Mr. Right,” getting married, and having kids, but that was really the farthest thing from her mind. For the first time in a long time, she was just...content. Living in the loft felt like she had a real family again. She didn’t really need or want anything else.

\---

When she had moved from Portland to LA to become a fashion model when she was 15 she had dropped out of high school and gone against her mother’s wishes. She could still hear her mother's words echoing in her head, _'Disapprove. Strong disapprove.'_ she had said in her firm, no-nonsense voice as Cece pleaded with her to change her mind. In 15 years, she hadn’t seen or spoken to her mother or anyone in her family and she had never gone back to visit her hometown of Portland. However, her mother still sent her a handwritten letter every time one of her numerous family members got married or had a baby. She kept all of them in a shoebox buried way in the back of her closet. It hurt her to look at them, but she couldn’t bear to throw them away either. They were the only ties she had left to her biological family and her childhood in Portland. 

\---

Cece’s mother had raised her all on her own when her father passed away from cancer when she was seven. The entire time her father was ill, Cece had never seen her mother cry. Her mother had always sat ramrod straight in a chair with a blank expression on her face holding her father’s hand. The only sign of distress was her slightly trembling upper lip. Her proud beautiful mother watching the love of her life wither away. It was the three of them and then suddenly it was just the two of them.

It pained her that her father's face was now an indistinct memory, but she still remembered the sharp smell of his cologne and the rough feel of his large hand in hers as he walked her to school. She still remembered how she loved running home from school to see him sitting in the living room in his favorite ottoman and how he would scoop her up onto his lap so she could tell him about her day while her mother watched them lovingly from the kitchen. 

She missed her mother and her childhood home in Portland desperately but she only allowed herself to think about them in the fuzzy period before she drifted off to sleep, quickly shoving them back into the gray haze of slumber.

\---

So that was the regular routine Cece fell into over the course of the year since she had moved into the loft: work at the bar, hang out with her boys, hook up with strangers…wash, rinse, repeat.

It was the perfect setup until it wasn't.


	2. Eggs (Or The Lack Thereof)

_Late._

She was late.

She double-checked her calendar again and broke out in a cold sweat. She was never late. You could set time by her periods. 

She tried to calm herself down. She was just stressed out from working at the bar. She shouldn’t freak out until she took a pregnancy test.

With that sound logic in mind, she calmly grabbed her keys and drove herself to the drugstore.

\---

Standing in the pregnancy test aisle of the drugstore trying to read and compare the millions of brands of different pregnancy tests made Cece feel like an awkward, flustered teenager. She had been standing here too long. Someone would notice and they would ask her what was wrong and it would be completely mortifying to have to tell a complete stranger all her secrets. They would ream her out for being this careless as a fully grown-ass adult woman, someone who decided she could adult decisions but had not prepared for this inevitability, and she would deserve it. She could feel herself starting to panic. _Just pick one,_ she told herself angrily. _It's not that hard._ But she looked at all the neatly packaged pastel boxes and she knew it was that hard. Everything in her life hinged upon the results of a puny seemingly insignificant plastic stick. _What if I get the wrong one?_ she thought to herself. _What if I get one that tells me I’m not pregnant, but I am?_

So she stood there frozen for over ten minutes staring at the shelf full of all the different types of pregnancy tests trying to decide which one would be the best one to decide her future, thinking about which would be the one to tell her what she wanted to hear and which would be the one to tell her the truth and possibly ruin her entire life. Her fate was quickly decided for her. She thought she saw someone else start to enter the aisle and that snapped her out of her trance. She quickly grabbed three different pregnancy tests and shoved them into her basket, hiding them under her other innocuous purchases of toothpaste and body lotion. _Lucky Number 3._ She checked off "buy pregnancy test" from her mental checklist and forced herself not to think about the implications. _Her life reduced to a series of checkboxes where every possible outcome had a neat solution, something concrete she could do to contain all the messiness of the decisions she had made and the liberating often reckless way she lived her life._

\---

She decided to take the pregnancy tests in the women’s bathroom at the bar. She couldn’t risk Nick, Winston, or Schmidt accidentally stumbling upon one of them in the loft bathroom or from snooping in her room and freaking out. She just wanted everything to stay the same. There was still a chance that this was nothing more than a minor blip in her menstrual cycle, a completely normal occurrence created out of stress and hormones.

She arrived 30 minutes early to work so she would have ample time to take the tests and dispose of the evidence before her shift. She went into the women’s bathroom and locked the door.

She took one pregnancy test out of her purse and followed its directions: _Plus for positive. Minus for negative._ She tapped her fingers against the bathroom sink as she waited the excruciating two minutes of required time before looking at the stick. It read: _Plus._ She suddenly had a hard time breathing. She took another pregnancy test out of her purse and tried again. The second test read: _Plus._ She tried the third test: _Plus._

She started to hyperventilate. She grabbed both sides of the sink and tried to calm herself down. She looked at her frightened expression in the mirror. 

_'Okay, Cece, so you’re pregnant. It’s not the end of the world. You can deal with this. People get pregnant all the time; it's practically what they were designed to do. Right now all you have to do is get rid of all these tests so no one else finds out and go to work.’_

She grabbed the open boxes and used pregnancy tests and shoved them to the bottom of the trash. Then she grabbed the trash bag and took it to the dumpster in the back alley, safely disposing of the contents where none of her coworkers would find them.

_\---_

“Yo! Cece!” Nick was waving his hand in front of her face trying to get her attention.

“…Hmm?” she answered as if waking up from a daydream.

“Table 5 said they ordered an old-fashioned and you just gave them gin in a mug with a peanut in it.”

 _Ugh!_ She had to slap herself in the forehead for being an idiot. "Sorry, Nick,” she apologized as she went to fix the drink order.

Nick squinted at her. “You feeling okay? You’ve been getting drink orders wrong all night. You haven’t been this bad since you first started working here.”

She pasted on a crooked smile. “Just tired, I guess.”

He looked at her with concern. “You want to go home early? I’ll cover for you.”

“Nah, that’s okay, Nick. I just have to pay more attention.”

He looked at her skeptically. “Just let me know if you want to go home, okay?”

“I’m fine, Nick,” she said firmly.

He went back to serving customers but she could feel his eyes on her back for the rest of the night.

\---

She booked an appointment with an OB/GYN.

As she waited anxiously in the patient room in her hospital gown, she couldn’t help wishing someone was there to hold her hand. She swallowed the thought down.

Dr. Sadie re-entered the room with a serious expression on her face.

"Well, you’re not pregnant."

Cece felt a rush of relief, but she noticed that Dr. Sadie continued to have that serious look on her face.

“I’m sorry to have to tell you this, Cece, but I have some bad news…” 

\---

 _She couldn’t have kids._ Dr. Sadie didn’t actually come out and say that of course, but that was the gist of what she was saying. She dressed it up in the language of hormone levels and probabilities but Cece could read between the lines. Everything after that had been a blur of facts and figures, educational pamphlets that reduced everything into the cold, neutral language of modern medicine, lists of psychologists and specialists to help her deal with her "special condition."

She had crumpled up all the paperwork the second she left the doctor's office and thrown it away in a nearby trashcan. She didn't want to think about it anymore; she didn't need to keep the evidence of what she already knew. She went home to her apartment and lay down on her bed curled up on her side. 

Nick came into her room and asked her if she was sick. He kept fussing over her, offering to make her soup or tea or to get her ice cream. He knew something was wrong even though he didn’t know exactly what it was. She knew it made him uncomfortable that he couldn’t find something to do to fix whatever funk she was in. For once, she didn’t want to see him or to even talk to him. He was her best friend but he was a guy and he would never understand this. Most guys could barely even talk about periods let alone what it meant to not be able to have children. It was a biological impossibility. She didn't want her friends to treat her like she had a "special condition" and try awkwardly to comfort her and convince her to go to the numerous specialists. She just wanted to lie here on her bed until this sick feeling inside herself went away and she felt normal again, even though she knew the idea of 'normal' was gone the second she woke up this morning. This would just be this thing that lived inside her forever ruining her entire life. Even though she had her family of misfits in the loft now, she felt alone again.

She looked up at him with an irritated expression. “I’m not sick, Nick. Can you just leave me alone?”

A flash of hurt crossed his face before he forced it back to a neutral expression. She never asks him to leave her alone unless she’s mad at him. “Did I do something to piss you off, Cece?”

“You didn’t do anything, Nick. A person can just want to be alone sometimes, you know.”

He doesn’t look like he quite believes her, but he doesn’t push the issue since he senses she clearly doesn’t want to talk about it right now. “Fine, fine, I’m going…” 

She breathes out a sigh of relief after he's gone. She’d never kept a secret from him before, but she wanted to keep this one. She didn’t want anyone to know about it but her. She always considered herself a strong person but she was broken now in a fundamental way. 

She didn’t even know if she wanted kids, but the option was quickly being taken from her. If she wanted kids, a family of her own, she had to start right now. Now was the best time she was ever going to get. 

She got up from her bed and went over to her closet. She dug in the back for the shoebox full of letters from her mom, letters filled with stories of marriage and babies, other people starting their lives with real families. She had secretly always wanted that but it had felt so far away from her actual life. It felt like some distant fantasy life she would just fall into once the universe decided she was ready. It felt like she had barely even begun her life when she moved into the loft so she had pushed it all to the back of her mind. Her current life never seemed to have room for the idea of a husband and kids to come home to, the idea of herself as someone's wife and mother. She thought she would have plenty of time left to decide exactly what she wanted her life to look like and to be able to find it out in the real world and turn it into a reality. But in that moment she felt it painfully deeply within herself. _A real family of her own._

Her fingers traced over her mother's neat script. She took out her phone and dialed a number she hadn’t called in over 15 years.

“Hey, Mom, it’s me…I think I’m ready to have you set me up now. This is not a prank. Call me back.”


End file.
